Part 33

At the sight of him, the marquis burst out laughing, and only then was Julien's justification complete.

If this young man betrays me, thought M. de La Mole, whom can one trust? and yet, when one acts, one must trust someone. My son and his brilliant friends of the same stamp have courage, loyalty for a hundred thousand crowns; if it came to fighting, they would perish on the steps of the throne, they know everything... except what is needed at the moment. The devil if I see one among them who could learn four pages by heart and travel a hundred leagues without being thrown off the scent. Norbert could get himself killed like his ancestors, that too is a conscript's merit...

The marquis fell into a deep reverie: And even getting oneself killed, he said with a sigh, perhaps this Sorel would know how to do it as well as he...

--Let us get into the carriage, said the marquis, as if to chase away an importunate thought.

--Sir, said Julien, while they were arranging this outfit, I learned by heart the first page of today's _Quotidienne_.

The marquis took the newspaper, and Julien recited without a single mistake. Good, said the marquis, quite diplomatic that evening; and all this time, the young man does not notice the streets we are passing through.

They arrived in a large salon of rather gloomy appearance, partly wainscoted and partly hung with green velvet. In the middle of the salon, a sullen footman was finishing the setting up of a large dining table, which he later turned into a worktable by means of an immense green carpet all stained with ink, a castoff from some ministry.

The master of the house was an enormous man, whose name was not uttered; Julien found in him the physiognomy and eloquence of a man who digests.

At a sign from the marquis, Julien had remained at the lower end of the table. To give himself a bearing, he began to cut pens. He counted, out of the corner of his eye, seven interlocutors, but Julien saw them only from behind. Two seemed to him to address M. de La Mole on a footing of equality; the others seemed more or less respectful.

A new personage entered without being announced. This is singular, thought Julien, they do not announce in this salon. Is this precaution taken on my account? Everyone rose to receive the newcomer. He wore the same extremely distinguished decoration as three others of the persons already in the salon. They spoke rather low. To judge the newcomer, Julien was reduced to what his features and bearing could tell him. He was short and thick, high-colored, with a bright eye and no expression other than the maliciousness of a wild boar.

Julien's attention was keenly distracted by the almost immediate arrival of a very different being. He was a tall, very thin man who wore three or four waistcoats. His eye was caressing, his gesture polite.

That is the whole physiognomy of the old bishop of Besançon, thought Julien. This man evidently belonged to the Church; he did not look more than fifty to fifty-five, one could not have a more paternal air.

The young bishop of Agde appeared; he looked greatly astonished when, reviewing those present, his eyes fell upon Julien. He had not spoken to him since the ceremony at Bray-le-Haut. His surprised glance embarrassed and irritated Julien. What then! said he to himself, will knowing a man always turn to my misfortune? All these great lords whom I have never seen do not intimidate me in the least, and the glance of this young bishop freezes me! One must admit that I am a very singular and very unhappy being.

A very dark little man soon entered with a flourish, and began to speak from the doorway; he had a yellow complexion and a somewhat mad air. From the arrival of this pitiless talker, groups formed, apparently to avoid the boredom of listening to him.

In moving away from the fireplace, they drew nearer to the lower end of the table, occupied by Julien. His bearing became more and more embarrassed, for, after all, however he tried, he could not help hearing, and however little experience he had, he understood the importance of the things being spoken of without any disguise; and how much the high personages he apparently had before his eyes must care that they remain secret!

Already, as slowly as possible, Julien had cut some twenty pens; this resource was about to fail him. He sought in vain for an order in M. de La Mole's eyes; the marquis had forgotten him.

What I am doing is ridiculous, Julien said to himself as he cut his pens; but men of such mediocre physiognomy, and charged by others or by themselves with such great interests, must be very touchy. My unhappy glance has something inquisitive and disrespectful about it, which would no doubt pique them. If I decidedly lower my eyes, I shall look as if I were collecting their words.

His embarrassment was extreme; he heard strange things.

CHAPTER XXII

THE DISCUSSION

The republic!—For one who today would sacrifice everything to the public good, there are thousands and millions who know nothing but their pleasures and their vanity. One is considered, in Paris, for one's carriage and not for one's virtue.

NAPOLÉON, Memorial.

The footman entered precipitately, saying:

--Monsieur the Duke of ***:

--Be silent, you are but a fool, said the duke as he entered.

He said this word so well, and with such majesty, that, in spite of himself, Julien thought that knowing how to be angry with a footman was the whole science of this great personage. Julien raised his eyes and lowered them at once. He had so well guessed the import of the new arrival that he trembled lest his glance be an indiscretion.

This duke was a man of fifty, dressed like a dandy, and moving by springs. He had a narrow head, with a large nose, and a hooked, forward-thrusting face; it would have been difficult to look more noble and more insignificant. His arrival determined the opening of the session.

Julien was vividly interrupted in his physiognomical observations by the voice of M. de La Mole.

--I present to you Abbé Sorel, said the marquis; he is endowed with an astonishing memory; it is only an hour since I spoke to him of the mission with which he might be honored, and, to give a proof of his memory, he has learned by heart the first page of the _Quotidienne_.

--Ah! the foreign news of that poor N..., said the master of the house.

He took the newspaper eagerly, and looking at Julien with a playful air, trying hard to seem important:

--Speak, sir, he said to him.

Silence was profound, all eyes fixed on Julien; he recited so well that after twenty lines:

--That is enough, said the duke.

The little man with the wild-boar eye sat down. He was the chairman, for scarcely seated, he pointed Julien to a card table and made a sign to bring it near him. Julien settled there with what was needed for writing. He counted twelve persons seated around the green carpet.

--Monsieur Sorel, said the duke, withdraw to the next room, you will be called.

The master of the house looked quite uneasy:

--The shutters are not closed, he said half-aloud to his neighbor.

--It is useless to look through the window, he cried foolishly to Julien. Here I am mixed up in a conspiracy at the least, thought the latter. Happily, it is not one of those that lead to the Place de Grève. If there were danger, I owe that and more to the marquis. Happy if it were given me to repair all the sorrow my follies may one day cause him!

Even as he thought of his follies and his misfortune, he looked at the place so as never to forget it. He then only remembered that he had not heard the marquis tell the footman the name of the street, and the marquis had taken a hackney coach, which never happened to him.

For a long time Julien was left to his reflections. He was in a salon hung with red velvet with broad gold braid. On the console there was a large ivory crucifix, and on the mantelpiece, the book _The Pope_, by M. de Maistre, gilt on the edges, and magnificently bound. Julien opened it so as not to look as if he were listening. From moment to moment they spoke very loud in the next room. At last the door opened, he was called.

--Bear in mind, gentlemen, said the chairman, that from this moment we speak before the Duke of ***. Monsieur, he said pointing to Julien, is a young Levite, devoted to our holy cause, and who will easily repeat, by means of his astonishing memory, even our slightest remarks.

The floor is yours, sir, he said indicating the paternal-looking personage who wore three or four waistcoats.

Julien thought it would have been more natural to name the Gentleman in the waistcoats. He took paper and wrote a great deal.

(Here the author would have liked to place a page of dots. That would be in bad taste, says the editor, and for a writing as frivolous as this, to lack grace is to die.

--Politics, resumes the author, is a stone tied to the neck of literature, and which, in less than six months, submerges it. Politics amid the interests of the imagination is a pistol shot amid a concert. This noise is piercing without being energetic. It accords with the sound of no instrument. This politics will mortally offend one half of readers and bore the other, who found it quite otherwise special and energetic in the morning paper...

--If your characters do not speak politics, resumes the editor, they are no longer the French of 1830, and your book is no longer a mirror, as you pretend...)

Julien's minutes ran to twenty-six pages; here is a very pale extract, for it has been necessary, as always, to suppress the absurdities whose excess would seem odious or little probable. (See the _Gazette des Tribunaux._)

The man in the waistcoats and with the paternal air (he was perhaps a bishop) often smiled, and then his eyes, surrounded by fluttering lids, took on a singular brightness and an expression less indecisive than usual. This personage, whom they made speak first before the duke (but what duke? Julien asked himself), apparently to set forth opinions and perform the functions of attorney general, seemed to Julien to fall into the uncertainty and lack of decided conclusions often reproached to such magistrates. In the course of the discussion, the duke even went so far as to reproach him for it.

After several phrases of morality and indulgent philosophy, the man in the waistcoats said:

--Noble England, guided by a great man, the immortal Pitt, spent forty billion francs to thwart the revolution. If this assembly permits me to approach with some frankness a sad idea, England did not sufficiently understand that, with a man such as Bonaparte, especially when one had to oppose him only a collection of good intentions, there was nothing decisive but personal means...

--Ah! there is the praise of assassination again! said the master of the house with an uneasy air.

--Spare us your sentimental homilies, cried the chairman angrily; his wild-boar eye shone with a ferocious gleam. Continue, he said to the man in the waistcoats. The chairman's cheeks and forehead turned purple.

--Noble England, resumed the reporter, is crushed today; for every Englishman, before paying for his bread, is obliged to pay the interest on the forty billion francs that were employed against the Jacobins. She has no more Pitt...

--She has the Duke of Wellington, said a military personage who assumed a very important air.

--For mercy's sake, silence, gentlemen, cried the chairman; if we argue again, it will have been useless to bring in M. Sorel.

--It is known that monsieur has many ideas, said the duke with a piqued air, looking at the interrupter, a former general of Napoleon.

Julien saw that this word alluded to something personal and very offensive. Everyone smiled; the renegade general appeared beside himself with anger.

--There is no more Pitt, gentlemen, resumed the reporter, with the discouraged air of a man who despairs of making reason heard by those who listen to him. Were there a new Pitt in England, one does not twice mystify a nation by the same means...

--Which is why a victorious general, a Bonaparte, is henceforth impossible in France, cried the military interrupter.

This time, neither the chairman nor the duke dared to be angry, though Julien thought he read in their eyes that they had good mind to. They lowered their eyes, and the duke contented himself with sighing so as to be heard by all.

But the reporter had taken offense.

--They are in haste to see me finish, he said with fire, and quite laying aside that smiling politeness and that measured language which Julien took for the expression of his character; they are in haste to see me finish, they give me no credit for the efforts I make to offend no one's ears, however long they may be. Well, gentlemen, I shall be brief.

And I shall tell you in very vulgar words: England has not a penny left in the service of the good cause. Pitt himself returning, with all his genius he would not succeed in mystifying the small English landowners, for they know that the brief campaign of Waterloo cost them, alone, a billion francs. Since plain speaking is wanted, added the reporter, growing more and more animated, I shall tell you: Help yourselves, for England has not a guinea at your service, and when England does not pay, Austria, Russia, Prussia, who have only courage and no money, can wage no more than one or two campaigns against France.

One may hope that the young soldiers gathered by Jacobinism will be beaten in the first campaign, perhaps the second; but in the third, though I should pass for a revolutionary in your prejudiced eyes, in the third you will have the soldiers of 1794, who were no longer the enlisted peasants of 1792.

Here the interruption came from three or four quarters at once.

--Sir, said the chairman to Julien, go and make a fair copy in the next room of the beginning of the minutes you have written. Julien withdrew much to his regret. The reporter had just approached probabilities that formed the subject of his habitual meditations.

They are afraid I shall mock them, he thought. When he was recalled, M. de La Mole was saying, with a seriousness which, for Julien who knew him, seemed quite droll:

--... Yes, gentlemen, it is especially of this unhappy people that one may say:

Shall he be god, table, or basin?

_He shall be god!_ cries the fabulist. It is to you, gentlemen, that this noble and profound word seems to belong. Act by yourselves and noble France will reappear much as our forefathers made her and as our eyes beheld her still before the death of Louis XVI.

England, her noble lords at least, execrate as we do the ignoble Jacobinism: without English gold, Austria, Russia, Prussia can deliver but two or three battles. Will that suffice to bring about a happy occupation, such as M. de Richelieu so stupidly wasted in 1817? I do not believe so.

Here there was an interruption, but stifled by the hushing of everyone. It came again from the former imperial general, who desired the blue ribbon, and wished to figure among the drafters of the secret note.

--I do not believe so, resumed M. de La Mole after the tumult.

He insisted on the _I_, with an insolence that charmed Julien. That is well played, he said to himself, all the while making his pen fly almost as fast as the marquis's words. With a well-chosen word, M. de La Mole annihilates the twenty campaigns of this renegade.

--It is not to the foreigner alone, continued the marquis in the most measured tone, that we can owe a new military occupation. All this youth, which writes incendiary articles in the _Globe_, will give you three or four thousand young captains, among whom may be found a Kléber, a Hoche, a Jourdan, a Pichegru, but less well intentioned.

--We did not know how to make glory for him, said the chairman; he should have been kept immortal.

--There must finally be two parties in France, resumed M. de La Mole, but two parties, not merely in name, two parties clearly marked and sharply divided. Let us know whom we must crush. On one side, the journalists, the electors, public opinion in a word, youth and all that admires it. While it stuns itself with the noise of its vain words, we, we have the certain advantage of consuming the budget.

Here again an interruption.

--You, sir, said M. de La Mole to the interrupter with an admirable haughtiness and ease, you do not consume, if the word offends you, you devour forty thousand francs entered in the state budget, and eighty thousand which you receive from the civil list.

Well, sir, since you force me to it, I take you boldly as an example. As your noble forefathers who followed Saint Louis on the crusade, you should, for these hundred and twenty thousand francs, show us at least a regiment, a company, what am I saying! half a company, were it but fifty men ready to fight, and devoted to the good cause, to the death. You have only lackeys who, in case of revolt, would frighten yourself.

The throne, the altar, the nobility may perish tomorrow, gentlemen, as long as you have not created in each department a force of five hundred _devoted_ men; but I say devoted, not only with all French bravery, but also with Spanish constancy.

Half of this troop must be composed of our children, our nephews, true gentlemen at last. Each of them shall have at his side, not a chattering little bourgeois, ready to hoist the tricolor cockade if 1815 presents itself again, but a good, simple, frank peasant like Cathelineau; our gentleman shall have indoctrinated him, he will be his foster brother if possible. Let each of us sacrifice a fifth of his income to form this little devoted troop of five hundred men per department. Then you may count on a foreign occupation. Never shall the foreign soldier penetrate even as far as Dijon, if he is not sure to find five hundred friendly soldiers in each department.

Foreign kings will listen to you only when you announce to them twenty thousand gentlemen ready to seize arms to open France's doors to them. This service is painful, you will say, gentlemen, our head is the price. Between the freedom of the press and our existence as gentlemen there is war to the death. Become manufacturers, peasants, or take up your musket. Be timid if you will, but do not be stupid; open your eyes.

_Form your battalions_, I shall say to you with the Jacobins' song; then there shall be found some noble GUSTAVUS-ADOLPHUS, touched by the imminent peril of the monarchical principle, who shall spring three hundred leagues from his country, and do for you what Gustavus did for the Protestant princes. Will you continue to speak without acting? In fifty years there will be no more in Europe than presidents of republics, and not a king. And with these three letters R, O, Y go the priests and the gentlemen. I see nothing more than candidates courting muddy majorities.

You may say what you will, that France has at this moment no accredited general, known and loved by all, that the army is organized only in the interest of the throne and the altar, that all the old soldiers have been taken from it, while each of the Prussian and Austrian regiments counts fifty non-commissioned officers who have seen fire.

Two hundred thousand young men belonging to the petty bourgeoisie are in love with war...

--Enough of unpleasant truths, said in a self-important tone a grave personage, apparently far advanced in ecclesiastical dignities, for M. de La Mole smiled pleasantly instead of growing angry, which was a great sign for Julien.

Enough of unpleasant truths, let us sum up, gentlemen: the man who is to have a gangrened leg amputated would be ill-advised to say to his surgeon: this sick leg is quite healthy. Pardon the expression, gentlemen, the noble Duke of *** is our surgeon...

At last the great word is spoken, thought Julien; it is toward the... that I shall gallop tonight.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE CLERGY, THE WOODS, LIBERTY

The first law of every being is to preserve itself, is to live. You sow hemlock and pretend to see ears of corn ripen!

MACHIAVEL.

The grave personage continued; one saw that he knew; he set forth, with a soft and moderate eloquence which pleased Julien infinitely, these great truths:

1º England has not a guinea at our service; economy and Hume are in fashion there. The Saints even will give us no money, and Mr. Brougham will mock us.

2º Impossible to obtain more than two campaigns from the kings of Europe, without English gold; and two campaigns will not suffice against the petty bourgeoisie.

3º Necessity of forming an armed party in France, otherwise the European monarchical principle will not hazard even those two campaigns.

--The fourth point which I dare propose to you as evident is this:

_Impossibility of forming an armed party in France without the clergy._ I tell you this boldly, because I am going to prove it to you, gentlemen. Everything must be given to the clergy.

1º Because, occupying themselves with their business night and day, and guided by men of high capacity established far from the storms three hundred leagues from your frontiers...

--Ah! Rome, Rome! cried the master of the house...

--Yes, sir, _Rome_! resumed the cardinal with pride. Whatever the more or less ingenious pleasantries that were in fashion when you were young, I shall say aloud, in 1830, that the clergy, guided by Rome, alone speaks to the common people.

Fifty thousand priests repeat the same words on the day indicated by the chiefs, and the people, who after all furnish the soldiers, will be more touched by the voice of their priests than by all the little verses in the world...

(This personality excited murmurs.)

--The clergy has a genius superior to yours, resumed the cardinal raising his voice; all the steps you have taken toward this capital point, _to have an armed party in France_, have been taken by us. Here appeared facts... Who sent eighty thousand muskets into the Vendée?... etc., etc.

As long as the clergy does not have its woods, it holds nothing. At the first war, the minister of finance writes to his agents that there is no more money than for the curates. At bottom, France does not believe, and she loves war. Whoever gives it to her will be doubly popular, for to make war is to starve the Jesuits, to speak as the vulgar do; to make war is to deliver these monsters of pride, the French, from the threat of foreign intervention.

The cardinal was listened to with favor...

--It would be necessary, he said, that M. de Nerval leave the ministry, his name needlessly irritates.

At this word, everyone rose and spoke at once. They are going to send me away again, thought Julien, but the wise chairman himself had forgotten the presence and existence of Julien.

All eyes sought a man whom Julien recognized. It was M. de Nerval, the prime minister he had glimpsed at the ball of the Duke of Retz.

_The disorder was at its height_, as the newspapers say speaking of the chamber. At the end of a good quarter of an hour, silence was somewhat re-established.

Then M. de Nerval rose, and, taking the tone of an apostle:

“Stories of the world, in your language.”